This School Leadership OER (Open Educational Resource) is one of a set of 20 units from TESS- India designed to help school leaders develop their understanding and skills so that they can lead improvements in teaching and learning in their school.The units are essentially practical, with activities to be carried out in school with staff, students and others. They are based on research and academic study of effective schools.
There is no prescribed order for studying the units,but ‘The school leader as enabler’ is the best place to start, as this provides an orientation for the whole set. You might choose to study the units in combinations related to specific themes; these ‘families’ of units have been aligned with the National College of School Leadership Curriculum Framework (India) key areas: ‘Perspective on school leadership’ (1); ‘Managing and developing self’ (2); ‘Transforming teaching-learning process’ (3);and ‘Leading partnerships’ (6). Key areas 4 and 5, on leading innovation and leading teams, are addressed in multiple units but not as a specific focus.Some units address more than one key area.
The units can be used by school leaders for self-study or as part of a taught leadership programme. In either scenario, there are benefitsinkeeping a personal Learning Diary,andin sharing the learning experience with others through discussion of the activities andcase studies. The term ‘school leader’ is used in these units to refer to a headteacher, principal, deputy teacher or any individual taking leadership responsibility in a school.
Video resources
The icon indicates where there are TESS-India School Leadership video resources in which Indian school leaders talk about how they are enacting change in their school to improve teaching and learning. It is hoped that they will inspire you to experiment with similar practices. The video resources are intended to complement and enhance you working through the text-based units, but are not integral to them should you be unable to access them.
TESS-India video resources may be viewed online or downloaded from the TESS-India website, . Alternatively, you may have access to these videos on a CD or memory card.
About the TESS-India (Teacher Education through School-based Support) project
TESS-India aims to improve the classroom practices of elementary and secondary teachers in India through the provision of OERs to support school leaders and teachers in developing student-centred, participatory approaches. The 105 TESS-India subject OERs provide teachers with a companion to the school textbook in the subjects of language, science and maths. They offer activities for teachers to try out in their classrooms with their students, together with case studies showing how other teachers have taught the topic and linked resources to support teachers in developing their lesson plans and subject knowledge.
All TESS-India OERs have been collaboratively written by Indian and international authors to address Indian curriculum and contexts, and are available for online and print use (). The OERs are available in several versions, appropriate for each participating Indian state and users are invited to adapt and localise the OERs further to meet local needs and contexts.
TESS-India is led by The Open University UK and funded by UK aid from the UK government.
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Perspective on leadership: planning and leading change in your school
What this unit is about
Change in its various forms is a common occurrence in educational systems and within schools. The drivers may be external or internal, or a combination of both. Change may be imposed on you or started by you. In most cases the ultimate aim is to move from a current state to a more desirable future state. Within a school context, this ultimately relates to improving student learning, either through direct changes to teaching and learning or through improving the effectiveness of school structures and systems to support learning.
In this unit you will consider what change means in your school or educational setting and consider some of the drivers of educational change. You will then move on to look at different leadership approaches such as collaborative, distributed, democratic and transformational leadership. You will link these different approaches and perspectives to educational leadership.
Motivation and trust are considered to be important levers for change. Therefore, you will spend some time looking at how best you can motivate yourself and others as you prepare to lead change. You will reflect on your role as a leader and consider how some of the issues presented in this unit can help you improve on your current practice.
Learning Diary
During your work on this unit you will be asked to make notes in your Learning Diary, a book or folder where you collect together your thoughts and plans in one place. Perhaps you have already started one.
You may be working through this unit alone, but you will learn much more if you are able to discuss your learning with another school leader. This could be a colleague with whom you already collaborate, or someone with whom you can build a new relationship. It could be done in an organised way or on a more informal basis. The notes you make in your Learning Diary will be useful for these kinds of meetings, while also mapping your longer-term learning and development.
What school leaders can learn in this unit
- To identify external and internal drivers for change within schools.
- To identify challenges to implementing change.
- To take necessary steps in planning and leading change in your school.
- To identify educational leadership approaches and relate these to your approach.
- To lead by example, inspiring and motivating others through a change project.
1 Introduction to change
Change can be a challenging process for both the leader(s) and participant(s) involved, as people may be worried about the consequences. In many educational systems, it is policymakers who often initiate many school-related changes; these are external drivers. However, there are also other instances where you as a leader, with your teachers, have also made small or medium-sized changes to your school in response to the needs and interests of your students and perhaps the community; these are internal drivers.
Activity 1: Drivers of change
As a starting point, think about changes that have happened recently in your school. Did they feel imposed from the outside or did they come about from the school community? They may be substantial changes to the curriculum or exams set by national or state bodies, or they may be smaller changes in your school that were initiated to make the day more productive for students.List five external factors and five internal factors that you feel have been the drivers of change in your school or district.
Discussion
The internal drivers you identify will depend heavily on the context you are working in and the resources available to you as a school leader. Even if your school has minimal resources and large classes, you can still initiate and lead considerable changes that will have a positive impact on learning, for example including more children with a disability or having more female students in the upper grades.
This activity may have prompted you to think about the kinds of changes you would like to realise in your school. They may be to do with introducing a more student-centred approach, facilitating more activity-based learning, valuing and respecting every child and their uniqueness, or organising assessment for learning rather than for exams/tests.
Table 1 shows examples of recent external drivers at elementary and secondary levels. Sometimes these are widely anticipated and there have been preparations to accommodate them; at other times they are more sudden. Some require immediate action; for others the change will be more gradual.
Table 1 External drivers at elementary and secondary levels.
Elementary / SecondaryNational Curriculum Framework (NCF)
Right to Education Act 2009 (RtE)
Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA)
Mid Day Meal Scheme
Mahila Samakhya Programme
Scheme to Provide Quality Education in Madrasas / Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA)
Model Schools Scheme
Girls’ Hostel Scheme
ICT @ Schools
Inclusive Education of the Disabled at Secondary Stage
Scheme of Vocational Education
National Means-cum-Merit Scholarship Scheme
National Incentive to Girls
Appointment of Language Teachers
2 Dealing with challenges
School leaders and teachers often face challenges when making changes. Case Studies 1 and 2 are examples of how teachers and others have set out to make a difference by initiating a change.
Case Study 1: Additional activities to boost attendanceTheme: Organisation of the school timetable/day.
Teacher: Mrs Kapur.
Context: Public school with 550 students. It is predominantly Muslim and is located in a medium-sized town.
Problem statement: Mrs Kapur noticed that the short length of the school day and pressure to complete the curriculum meant that little time was available for students to participate in creative or sporting activities. These activities are important for the students’ overall development. In addition, she was concerned about student attendance and wanted a means of motivating them to be at school.
The change: The change that Mrs Kapur initiated to address this challenge involved lengthening the school day. By adding an extra halfanhour at the end of each school day, Mrs Kapur was able to create time and space for unique activities without compromising on the school’s focus on the core curriculum. Activities such as sports (karate), games including carrom and chess, and library time are rotated. Students donot know which activity they will participate in at the end of each day, which adds an element of surprise and generates additional interest in coming to school. The value of the innovation is its contribution to the holistic development of the child while increasing both the students’ enjoyment of school and the time available for learning.
Why this is interesting: It seeks to address the current situation where an Indian child typically spends only four hours at school, compared to six to eight hours that students in developed countries spend at school. In addition, it recognises the need to create an enjoyable environment at school to improve attendance.
Potential implementation challenges: The school management committee (SMC) may need convincing. There may be significant resource challenges to providing extra-curricular activities. Schools should be careful to offer activities that students are actually interested in and to ensure that girls and boys benefit equally.
Impact so far (according to teacher): Mrs Kapur has seen attendance increase and discipline improve markedly. Students are now excited to be in school.
Case Study 2: Health check-ups to safeguard learning
Theme: External factors impacting on education (e.g. nutrition or health).
Teacher: Mr Chakrakodi.
Context: Public school located in a very deprived area of East Delhi.
Problem statement: Mr Chakrakodi knew that many of his students had no access to healthcare and that they lived in environments that were unhygienic. This resulted in sick students either attending school and spreading disease, or being consistently absent.
The change: The change designed to overcome this problem involved a triple-pronged health scheme. By brokering relationships with local medical professionals, Mr Chakrakodi ensured free medical check-ups for students every two months and a free eyesight testing service. Finally, Mr Chakrakodi found a sponsor to provide healthy lunches specifically to younger students, who need vitamins for healthy growth. The value of this change is that students are not only provided with healthcare and eye tests, but that they are taught how to live more healthily.
Why this is interesting: It takes a preventative approach to reducing student absence, which is so damaging for learning.
Potential implementation challenges: In order to be successful at scale, doctors and nurses would need to be incentivised to provide healthcare in schools.
Impact so far (according to teacher): Mr Chakrakodi reports that student attendance has improved, concentration has increased markedly and there has been buy-in from parents, who have engaged with the school in appreciation for the health services provided. One of the bi-monthly check-ups successfully diagnosed a student with a serious liver infection, which, as a result, was treated in time. Mr Chakrakodi has now expanded the free eye care service into the community.
Figure 1 Strategies will improve student learning.
Although your school may not face the same issues, it is worth thinking about some of the challenges that your staff and students face, and to begin to think about how you, as a school leader, can put strategies in place to alleviate them and improve student learning. You should also think about how you will approach these changes, and how you will work with staff, students and the community to ensure that whatever you put in place is sustained and has real impact on the lives and learning of your students.
3 How change happens
Several views have been presented on how change comes about in our schools and educational settings. One such argument is the notion of internally versus externally initiated change. By internally initiated change we consider all students, teachers and administration staff as potential change agents who, through their work, are able to initiate and implement change (mainly owing to the need to improve on quality and standards). This is often described as the voluntarist view, because the emphasis is on how the voluntary (or self-initiated) actions of leaders and other change agents bring about change within the school.
Another view is that most educational change is externally initiated. This is characterised by pressures from education authorities as new policies are introduced. This is often referred to as the deterministic view, because it sees leaders and their staff as targets of a change that is determined by external forces (economics, technology, globalisation, culture shift, etc.). Many teachers and school leaders say that they often experience this kind of change where the requirement to change is demanded or enforced.
Change in the school context refers to any form of change that takes place in the school, whether it is deliberate action by staff or students to change the status quo, or is a state or national initiative. The change could be proactive (a deliberate, self-initiated action) or reactive (responding to a stimulus).
Regardless of whether it is internally or externally driven, there are two ways of looking at how change is actually initiated within a school (Figure 2).
Figure 2 Top-down and bottom-up change.
Top-down change can be seen as relatively easy and straightforward to put into practice across the school, provided it is negotiated and agreed by staff and SMC members – which is not always the case. It usually takes a school-wide approach, and so has the advantage of promoting a consistent, systematic approach to the change at hand. Top-down change usually involves some degree of consultation with those implementing the change; however, particularly in times of crisis, top-down change can be imposed in a directive and coercive way without staff consultation. This may have severe consequences for motivation and morale, but if organisational survival is at stake, school staff may well accept the need for rapid and drastic action without a consultation process.
Bottom-up change, on the other hand, has the advantage of being designed by the school community itself. This is mandated by the RtE, wherein SMCs are to develop, implement and monitor plans, and then promote it across the school. Bottom-up change may also be suggested by anyone in the school, but then implemented by senior staff who have the authority to influence and drive it through. However, it often requires a high degree of negotiation, and a school community may not readily agree on a change; so it raises other challenging issues. For this reason, bottom-up change is sometimes considered to be unpredictable and it takes time for it to be adopted across the organisation.
Figure 3 Listening to students’ ideas.
To minimise problems in any change initiative, some school leaders implement their change in one area of the school as a pilot scheme to try out new ways of working, assess problems and issues that arise, and make any necessary adjustments before rolling it out across the whole school. This means that any major weaknesses can be sorted before introducing the change on a larger scale.
Activity 2: Changes in your school
Spend some time thinking of three significant changes that have taken place in your school in the last year or two. They might be large or small changes, but they will have meant that people had to change their priorities, behaviours or processes. In your Learning Diary, make notes related to the following questions:- What was the driver or initiator for each change?
- How did you and others respond to that driver?
- What were the challenges of implementing the change?
- How did you and your colleagues cope with the change?
- What has been the impact of the change on student learning?
Educational change initiatives can embrace a broad range of issues: classroom practice, school-level change or larger-scale transformation at state or national level. Your own response will vary from that of other school leaders, because change affects everyone differently. Some colleagues may have a wealth of experience of change; others may be witnessing it for the first time. While some may be anxious about change and their role, others may seize the opportunity to steer and influence.
The examples in Case Studies 1 and 2 are typical of bottom-up change. Although external stakeholders were involved in the success story reported at New Shishu Public School, the change was started by school leaders who recognised and addressed a local problem.
It is preferable to get buy-in or agreement from all stakeholders in any change initiative. However, you may find yourself in a situation where not everyone shares your view of the future. For this reason, your approach to any change is crucial. You will consider some of these issues in Section 6.
There are therefore three important things to bear in mind when leading or managing change: